Plant Horror Dawn Keetley • Angela Tenga Editors Plant Horror Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film Editors Dawn Keetley Angela Tenga Lehigh University Florida Institute of Technology Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA Melbourne, Florida, USA ISBN 978-1-137-57062-8 ISBN 978-1-137-57063-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57063-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960682 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image © Westend61/Markus Keller Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom ABsTRACTs 1. INTRODUCTiON: SiX THEsEs ON PLANT HORROR; OR, WHY ARE PLANTs HORRiFYiNG? Dawn Keetley Evoking Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s influential 1996 essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” this Introduction maps out six theses suggesting why plants—defined broadly as vegetation, flowers, bushes, trees—have ­figured as monstrous within horror fiction and film: (1) Plants embody an abso- lute alterity; (2) Plants lurk in our blindspot; (3) Plants menace with their wild, purposeless growth; (4) The human harbors an uncanny constitutive vegetal; (5) Plants will get their revenge; and (6) Plant horror marks an absolute rupture of the known. 2. THE PRE-COsMiC SQUiGGLE: TENDRiL EXCEssEs iN EARLY MODERN ART AND SCiENCE FiCTiON CiNEMA Agnes Scherer This chapter explores parallels between early modern tendril-arabesques and those plant monsters that send forth tendrils in modern cinematic ­horror. In both contexts, a beautiful and horrifying impression is grounded in the ambivalence evoked by movements of growth. This horror connects the discourses of inner and outer space, tame and wild, order and chaos, self and other. From the tendril-scrollwork that dominates the margins v vi AbstRacts of painted books, artistic craftwork, and interior walls from the fifteenth ­century onwards through to modern plant horror films, vegetal growth and movement have represented an unmanageable wildness. The horror­ of The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Day of the Triffids (1962) still bears a residue of the discourse around wildness and tameness out of which the scrollwork of the fifteenth century emerged. 3. SEEDs OF HORROR: SACRiFiCE AND SUpREMACY iN SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIgHT, THE WICkER MAN, AND CHILDREN OF THE CORN Angela Tenga Although notions of subjectivity and agency are seldom applied to plants in Western thought, narratives that feature menacing plants have enjoyed a certain notoriety. Ambivalence about the plant–human relationship is already evident in the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight while, in modern times, this anxiety finds expression in works like The Wicker Man (1973) and Children of the Corn (2009). In these works, an empowered vegetal dominates the human and demands sacrifice. While human society has often associated sacrifice with fertility, abundance, and renewal, these narratives assert the priority of the vegetal world. Moreover, they connect plant dominance with the tension between Christianity and heathen belief, countering many popular biblical inter- pretations by suggesting that humankind is neither separate from nature, nor above it. 4. THE MANDRAKE’s LETHAL CRY: HOMUNCULAR PLANTs iN J. K. ROwLiNG’s HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAmBER OF SECRETs Keridiana W. Chez In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), a ­monstrous animal necessitates both the care and the depredation of ­monstrously humanized plants. With its lethal gaze, the basilisk petrifies animal life, which can be revived only by a potion made from the mandrake plant. On one hand, human characters invest energies to ensure the plants’ AbstRacts vii ­well-­being, implicitly recognizing the shared vulnerability of all life; on the other hand, they are repulsed by their dependence on a “lesser” species. Tracing these contradictions, this chapter explores the affects and practices arising from the recognition and denial of human–plant co-dependency. Drawing on various sources—from the Bible to medieval herbals and nineteenth-century encyclopedias—this chapter contextualizes the Harry Potter mandrake in centuries of plant lore that regarded the uncannily homuncular mandrake as an evil spirit. 5. GREEN HELLs: MONsTROUs VEGETATiONs iN TwENTiETH-CENTURY REpREsENTATiONs OF AMAZONiA Camilo Jaramillo This chapter offers a preliminary canon for Latin America’s plant ­horror aesthetic, examining early twentieth-century literary representations of Amazonia that depicted the region as a space dominated by a violent, treacherous, uncontrollable, and overwhelmingly powerful vegetation—a­ veritable “green hell.” This symbolic depiction of Amazonia is ­exemplified in the fiction of Alberto Rangel, José Eustasio Rivera, and Rómulo Gallagos, creating an enduring trope that re-surfaces in Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) as well as Eli Roth’s more recent Green Inferno (2013). While these depictions reveal the frustrations around modernity’s project to domesticate and consume nature, they can also be read as representations that challenge and critique the Western tradition of rendering Amazonia as a site of exploitable natural wealth. 6. WHAT WE THiNK ABOUT WHEN WE THiNK ABOUT TRiFFiDs: THE MONsTROUs VEGETAL iN POsT-WAR BRiTisH SCiENCE FiCTiON Graham J. Matthews John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) and John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) portray the submerged interdependencies­ between plant and human in ways that question the complacency of human ­self-­conceptions and the logic of cynical reason. Wyndham and Christopher signal the necessary limits of anthropomorphism and viii AbstRacts ­indicate that plant-­ ­thought can be known only through the rejection of ­metaphysical categories, dialectical thought, and traditional ways of ­seeing. A reading attentive to anthropomorphic language and the logic of cynical reason offers an appreciation of plant life as life in itself. Plant life presents an alternative ontology to instrumental reason, which appropri- ates nature as a collection of resources and raw materials to be managed and consumed by humans. 7. THE REvENGE OF THE LAwN: THE AwFUL AGENCY OF UNCONTAiNED PLANT LiFE iN WARD MOORE’s GREENER THAN YOU THINk AND THOMAs DisCH’s THE GENOCIDEs Jill E. Anderson During the Cold War, the suburban lawn became the symbol of American affluence. At the same time, anxiety about global overpopulation prompted efforts to explore the possibilities of turning non-arable land into farmland. These two contrasting conceptualizations—both based on the human need to control and maintain plant life—replicate narratives of Cold War containment, order, and normalcy. Horror stories from this period feature unmanageable plant life that exists for its own proliferation and violates, with its undisciplined abundance, the strictures of Cold War conformity. Through readings of Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think (1947) and Thomas Disch’s The Genocides (1965), this chapter explores how plants that escape the disciplining mechanisms of Cold War society represent the fragility of American containment by disrupting the primacy of American progress, power, and control. 8. VEGETABLE DisCOURsEs iN THE 1950s US SCiENCE FiCTiON FiLM Adam Knee The 1950s cycle of US science fiction films is known for its often ­outlandish representations of all manner of nonhuman others, which ­articulate a broad range of Cold War fears—fears of national border incur- sion, of brainwashing or mind control, of violence or mass destruction. This ­chapter argues that over the course of the decade and into the early AbstRacts ix 1960s (as the initial Cold War wave of US science fiction subsided), a distinctive and largely negative discourse about the vegetative develops in these films. Of ongoing significance to the genre, this discourse locates in the ­botanical a particularly threatening form of otherness, characterized by a disposition toward and means for rapid invasion and sometimes actual physical attack, combined with a chilling lack of emotion. 9. SARTRE AND THE ROOTs OF PLANT HORROR Randy Laist The most famous tree in all existential